I agree. It probably sucks to pay for way more capacity than needed for 90% of the time but people would only leave Reddit in waves which is when voat absolutely needs to be able to handle the traffic.

If you want to invest international and you already have money abroad, I would keep that money abroad and invest it directly. By investing in US-domiciled international funds (I'm going to use Emerging Markets ETFs in this example), you pay fees to the middlemen in the form of expense ratios that could cut 15 to 100 basis points off your return (0.15% to 1.00%): http://etfdb.com/etfdb-category/emerging-markets-equities/#expenses

However, that also depends on your investing skill and comfort. Investing in the Vanguard Emerging Markets ETF gives you instant diversification across countries and industries but you don't get to choose the allocation. The top 10 holdings in VWO for example are Tencent, China Construction Bank, China Mobile, Taiwan Semicondutor, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. You can see how this is very China-heavy and 27% of the fund is in China versus 7% in Brazil and 5% in Mexico. If you're looking for a set-it-and-forget-it fund, VEU (Total World ex-US) http://etfdb.com/etf/VEU/ combined with SPY might be a better option.

Long story short, if you believe in your skill and knowledge, investing directly is the cheaper option and also gives you direct control of your holdings, as well as open up new investible opportunities that a US-based investor cannot access such as the mainland China A-shares. However, if you're more interested in just gaining exposure to Asia/global equities, bringing the money back to the US and investing global ETFs is likely the simpler, headache-free strategy (tax implications aside. I am not an expert in tax law).

It doesn't seem like it. My sense is that it's a snapback reaction from the recession. In a hypothetical world, employers would reduce costs by implementing a paycut across all employees. In the real world however, this is close to impossible to implement, and what ends up happening is that employers end up freezing wages and pushing most of the cost savings onto the younger workers and new hires. An example would be the two-tiered wage system implemented for UAW members (GM, Ford, etc), where workers hired before 2008 start at $28/hour but new hires start at $15.78/hour, before increasing to $19.28/hour after four years. (Side note, the two-tier system for UAW members might be eliminated soon: http://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2015/03/24/uaw-ford-gm-bargaining-convention-jobs/70380112/)

What happened was that employers reduced labor cost on average by keeping senior wages artificially high (unchanged) and bringing new hires much lower. As the economy recovers, employers are reluctant to move senior wages that much since they are already higher than company average, but must pay new hires more competitively to retain them as job openings spring up. In other words, employers are bringing young worker and new hire wages back to the market rate as their job prospects pick up.